Interesting, if you’re a company and trying to get people to try your product, why not go on a road tour? That’s what IdeaBlade is doing. They are holding a nine-city tour for .NET developers. Silicon Valley, next week, then Dallas, New York, Washington DC, Seattle, Boston, Toronto, Atlanta, Chicago.

Tim O’Reilly is sitting next to me. For the past hour he was typing furiously. So, I just visited his blog to read what he was writing.

He wrote, in a post titled OCA vs. Google Print Library Project?: “This PR positioning makes me think that the OCA, a worthwhile effort (to which O’Reilly has contributed content), is being hijacked by Yahoo! and Microsoft as a way of undermining Google.”

I leaned over and said “I wish we were that smart.” We both had a good laugh about that.

Renee Blodgett (she’s Silicon Valley’s PR maven) is talking with me. She wants to go to Paris, France, but needs to know that she will be able to use a cell phone in Paris. I told her “hmmm, I have no idea about that, so let me blog it.” I remembered that my readers are smarter than I am. I was wondering that myself cause I’ll be in Paris in December. One thing is we need to keep the cost of calls fairly low cost.

Jeremy Hague of Skylook (which lets you record Skype calls inside Outlook) has been sending me WaxMail’s. What’s that? It lets you send voice from right inside Outlook. So, if you are tired of typing you can send a voice message. It’s an MP3 generator, basically. Hmmm, I wonder if I could use this to record a podcast? I’d love to be able to record a WaxMail, and then email that to a podcast service and have it put up.

When I was making my tour of Silicon Valley’s startups yesterday I sat down for lunch with Chris Law. He recorded our conversation and podcasted it (he has other interviews including with a VP from Yahoo).

One thing I disagree with is when he says “I haven’t seen an example of a startup using Microsoft stuff in a serious way.”

Out of the three startups I met yesterday here in Silicon Valley, only one is using Linux stuff. And, a fourth, that I just talked with on email, is Ingenio.

They are making a BIG bet on Microsoft technologyl. They are serving 20 million minutes of calls every quarter. Ron Hirson, program management director of Ingenio says they are very happy with our stuff.

Another startup using our stuff? Weblogsinc.com. They just sold to AOL for $25 million. They run on our stuff. We are interested in working with all businesses, whether it’s one guy in a Silicon Valley garage, or it’s something like MySpace.com that runs the fourth largest Web site in the world (they are using our stuff too).